brooks-debt

name

brooks-debt

description

Tech debt assessment that identifies, classifies, and prioritizes maintainability problems — helping teams build a refactoring roadmap — drawing on twelve classic engineering books. Triggers when: user asks about tech debt, refactoring priorities, what to clean up first, or asks "why is this so hard to change?", "where's the most painful part?", "what should we fix first?", "how do I justify refactoring to management?", "why is our velocity dropping?". Do NOT trigger for: server health checks, HTTP /health endpoints, Kubernetes probes, database health, or application uptime — "health" in those contexts is infrastructure, not code quality. Also not for single-function refactoring questions.

Brooks-Lint — Tech Debt Assessment

Setup

1. Read ../_shared/common.md for the Iron Law, Project Config, Report Template, and Health Score rules
2. Read ../_shared/source-coverage.md for book-level coverage, exceptions, and tradeoffs
3. Read ../_shared/decay-risks.md for symptom definitions and source attributions
4. Read debt-guide.md in this directory for the debt classification framework

Process

If the user has not described the codebase or pointed to specific areas: apply Auto Scope Detection from ../_shared/common.md to determine the assessment scope before proceeding.

1. Scan for all six decay risks (Step 1 of the guide); list every finding before scoring
2. Apply the Pain × Spread priority formula and classify debt intent (Steps 2–3 of the guide)
3. Group findings by decay risk (Step 4 of the guide)
4. Output using the Report Template from common.md, plus the Debt Summary Table

Mode line in report: Tech Debt Assessment